A police head constable from Bengaluru rural district and three others have been arrested in Odisha’s Kandhamal on the charges of possessing Marijuana and sent to 14-day judicial custody.
The police in Karnataka claim Anand K, a police head constable attached to the Jigani police station in Bengaluru rural district, was investigating the case but there was a procedural lapse that led to his arrest.
The others who were arrested by Sarangada police on November 1 are Jayant, an Odia interpreter, Shyam Sundar, a police informant, and Naresh Pradhan, a suspect in a drug supply case in Jigani.
According to a police officer in Karnataka, Anand K was in Odisha to investigate a drug peddling case reported in October, which revealed the role of Sujit Rawat, a Marijuana supplier from Odisha who sent the contraband through trains. Jigani police received information from Naresh during the probe, and sent their team to Odisha for further crackdown on the gang.
A senior police officer said, “A team of six police officers led by Assistant Police Sub-Inspector Appaji took Sundar and Jayant with them. Jayant, who knew Odia, helped with translation. On October 31, the Bengaluru SP permitted them to go to Odisha. The next day, when the police had laid a trap posing as drug peddlers, Sundar managed to contact peddlers who agreed to supply 17 kg of Marijuana”.
Green oasis: An impression of how Bengaluru Airport’s Terminal 2 will look by next April.
BIAL
Global travel retailer Dufry will operate the duty-free shops at South India’s busiest airport under a newly agreed joint venture that is scheduled to start on April 1, next year. The deal was struck after the operator of Bengaluru Airport—the gateway to India’s technology hub—issued an open tender in November 2021 which Dufry won.
The Switzerland-based retailer will partner with the operator, Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL), in a 50:50 joint venture with a 15-year contract to operate and manage duty-free outlets in the airport’s new Terminal 2.
Dufry, which has seen strong growth in Q3, already runs duty-free shops at Bengaluru Airport—the full name is Kempegowda International Airport—and has done so since 2008 through its subsidiary Nuance. The new deal secured the retailer’s position at the new T2 where works are meant to finish by the end of the first quarter in 2023. A Dufry spokesperson told Forbes.com: “All international flights will be migrated to this new terminal.”
In a tweet on Tuesday, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi described the new Bengaluru T2 as “giving … [+] impetus to airport capacity expansion and boosting commerce.” (Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images)
Getty Images
BIAL describes the new T2 as a ‘terminal in a garden’ thanks to the greenery of the complex which includes planted walls, hanging gardens, artificial waterfalls, and outdoor gardens surrounding a lagoon. The building—which will be officially inaugurated by India’s prime minister Narendra Modi on November 11—will boost Bengaluru Airport’s passenger capacity by 25 million annually, in the first phase of the project. An additional 20 million will be added in the second phase.
From a retail perspective, the capacity boost promises a steady increase in passengers in the coming years. In the 12 months to March 2022, Kempegowda International was the third busiest airport in India handling 16.3 million passengers, and between April and October this year, it processed almost 17 million of which two million were international.
A JV to spur luxury, fashion, and beauty
Dufry’s contract covers almost 40,000 square feet of retail space spread across international departures and arrivals in the new terminal. The joint venture is not restricted to core duty-free shops and allows the possibility for Dufry to look at introducing luxury boutiques and other formats. A spokesperson said: “Further developments and extension of the contract within the JV are possible.”
Given that both BIAL, the airport operator, and Dufry are sharing the risks and rewards, it should be easier for the Swiss retailer to move forward with new retail concepts so long as they are commercially viable.
In a statement, Dufry’s chief operating officer for the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, and Middle East regions, Alberto Iglesias, said: “We are committed to providing passengers with an enhanced shopping experience and featuring a considerably extended product assortment.”
For its part, BIAL seems happy to deepen its longstanding relationship with Dufry in a new terminal that is expected to wow Indian travelers. The airport’s chief commercial officer, Kenneth Guldbjerg, said: “We will benefit from Dufry’s expertise to take the airport’s shopping experience to an entirely new level. He added that, through the JV, the airport was looking to up its game across several categories “especially in luxury fashion, beauty, and confectionery.”
This is not Dufry’s first airport JV. The travel retailer works in similar partnerships in Milan Linate Airport, Sharjah in the UAE UAE , and across several U.S. airports where ACDBE cooperation is often a legal requirement. Airport owners have increasingly been moving towards joint ventures with retailers over the years to pocket more revenue. Other examples include Heinemann and Fraport at Frankfurt Airport; and Lagardère Travel Retail at Paris Charles de Gaulle and Paris Orly airports.
Within the small number of students in India that take up entrepreneurship, engineer-founders dominate the landscape. Graduates from the other islands of educational excellence in the country—B-schools, especially the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs)—have mostly stuck to risk-averse corporate jobs. One would imagine B-school graduates to be at the forefront of setting up new businesses, having soaked up business expertise during their management course. But that’s not the case. Sample this: there are 5,489 start-ups founded by graduates of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs)—Bombay, Delhi, Guwahati, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras, and Roorkee— while graduates of IIMs (Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Calcutta) have produced 1,517 start-ups as of October 10, 2022, per Tracxn data. Of India’s 108 unicorns, 60 have founders from the same set of seven IITs mentioned above while 25 have founders from IIMA, IIMB and IIMC. It would be accurate to say that there are way more engineer-founders in the country today than manager-founders.
While management graduates taking to entrepreneurship straight out of college may continue to be a small number for the foreseeable future, B-schools are not immune to the charms of the start-up space. “We decided some years ago that every MBA student at IIMB needs to develop an entrepreneurial orientation,” says Rishikesha T. Krishnan, Director of IIMB. Bhagwan Chowdhry, Faculty Director of I-Venture@ISB, the start-up accelerator and incubator of the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, says that ISB was started 20 years ago with the idea of preparing managers to work for the Amazons and Googles. “Now, we notice that many of our alumni graduate from those corporate jobs, and start companies of their own. Today, entrepreneurship is a big piece of business education,” he adds. Great Lakes’ mission is to develop future-ready business leaders as well as entrepreneurs. “We want to participate in the start-up ecosystem. Entrepreneurship is a core part of our curriculum,” says Suresh Ramanathan, Dean of Chennai-based Great Lakes Institute of Management.
The way they look at it, it’s not necessarily about producing start-up founders and certainly not right after B-school. But it’s about creating a problem-solving mindset among students and showing them that they do not have to limit themselves to working for large corporates. And the institutes are stepping up their efforts to inspire entrepreneurial thinking. For instance, The IIMAvericks Fellowship Program, launched by IIMA in 2012-13, pays final-year students deciding to become entrepreneurs a salary for two years. If their start-up doesn’t work out, they can come back and sit for placements again. ISB has launched a similar one-year scholarship for students interested in entrepreneurship from the class of 2023. IIMB—which is located in India’s start-up capital of Bengaluru—introduced a compulsory course on entrepreneurship a few years ago, has an active entrepreneurship club, gets students to work with the companies incubated on campus, and offers deferred placements. Great Lakes—which has seen healthy enrolments for the entrepreneurship courses introduced last year—is also exploring start-up scholarships. But the professors admit that adoption is very low. “I won’t say that there’s a large number of current students who are interested [in the scholarship programme]. But there are many others in whom we are planting the seeds, because we know they will be back in this game five years from now,” says Chowdhry.
